Career Destroying La Masia - Can Barca be relegated?

[samhardy]

Do not adjust your set, this is indeed a rare career from me, and one that hopefully I can get through a lot quicker than my last one

I’m taking on my own version of this classic @Ashez challenge. Not sure whether it’ll be possible but let’s see.

 

In short, I will be playing as Barcelona’s fiercest rivals Espanyol, and the only players I’ll be signing will be from the Spanish “giants”. The long term aim is to weaken Barca so much that they get relegated from La Liga.

A secondary aim will be to improve our own reserve side so much that every season will end up being a 1-2 with both my first and second teams winning their respective divisions.

One other thing, I won’t be using players that come through the youth system for either the first team or reserves, so alongside the players that I have in my starting squad everyone will have crossed the divide.

So without further ado, let’s see how things started:

Transfer Window

The short answer to how things started is well, not great. Adjusting the budgets and selling a few players only gave us a budget of about £30M which you don’t need me to tell you will not buy any player Barca would be too bothered about getting rid of.

This meant I had two options:

• Buy a few promising youth players, that could improve my first team squad and help out the reserves if they weren’t playing often enough for me.
• The boring route - not sign anyone in the first window and keep the money for myself instead of boosting Barca’s transfer budget.

I decided not to be boring in the end and picked up a few youngsters who will undoubtedly improve throughout the season, along with Arda Turan who will do a job as a squad player.

Spoiler

Seem to be missing the Monchu screenshot, but he’s a playmaker and doesn’t look too bad. The pitchforks were out very quickly after the Turan signing though:

Here’s the squad we started (and finished, we signed nobody else in January) the season with. A few recognisable names in there. Calleri is missing from that screenshot who’s a decent striker.

So that’s the introduction. I’ve finished the first season and will update the first half of the season later in the week.

The third game of the season is the first Catalan derby, Barca away 😬 The aim for the season is of course to win the league, but at a bare minimum finish above Barca.

Thanks for reading and hopefully you enjoy the rapid updates*** I will be providing.

*** Absolutely in no way a guarantee and a season a month might be more realistic 🤣

[jthompy23]

Looks like a big ask!

Good luck!

[AdamNufc]

Sounds an interesting save @samhardy , might a be a long term challenge if you keep only getting £30m budgets at least until some of their best players age and their values drop considerably , Good Luck

[Rob]

Excellent. A @samhardy career - rarer than a Lee Cattermole goal. Best of luck!

[Woody]

Just fell off me chair! 

Best of luck mate. Just abit of advice you'll probably not take but De la Fuente if trained will turn into a beast of a striker. Trust me 😉

[Ian]

Good luck Sam, bad luck Barca!

[broodje kip]

Here comes 6 months long update! Good luck Sam

[Schwantz34]

What a great carer this is! A fun idea 🤣

[Scratch]

Good luck Sam! I like the concept.

Sort of reminds me of the Second Chances challenge that was popular a few years back - I used to try to weaken the promotion challengers of the second chance teams. Lets just say that no team ever has had so many goalkeepers in the Reserve team as mine did! 😄

[FuddledFox]

I will be disgusted if you don’t sign Messi.